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In
the Wind St. Martin's Minotaur, April
2008cover design by David Rotstein

I'm fascinated by fear.

Fear provides the momentum of much crime fiction - giving the
reader the
benefit of
an adrenaline rush without any actual risk. We must enjoy being
anxious;
otherwise the bestseller lists wouldn't be so dominated by thrillers. Patrick
Anderson suggests the genre is not only entertaining, it
satisfies
an urge to examine the darker parts of society without entirely
sacrificing hope. Yet, according to critic Stephen
Knight, we can no
longer assume that in a fictional framework wrongs will be righted,
that order will be restored. Instead, the representation of violence
and social injustice in crime fiction today “provides a
coherent form of contemporary anxiety” and gives our deepest
fears narrative shape.

Fear also plays a political role. Inchoate
fears can be heightened and focused on an invisible enemy in order to
discourage dissent. When doing background reading
for In the Wind, I
was surprised to see how little editorial work it would take
to turn the 1976 Church
Committee
report on the abuses of government surveillance during the Vietnam War
era
into a description of today's climate for civil liberties. Just replace
the variations of the
word "Communism" with
"terrorism." Plus
ça
change.

I
was raised in the 1960s in Madison, Wisconsin, a pleasant university
town between
two
enormous lakes, where resistance
to an unpopular war led to frequent
street battles. Though mass protests aren't so frequent these
days, I've had
a near-constantsense
of déjà vu during our current state of war. As
I write this, I've just read a story in
this morning's New York Times
that details the recently-declassified plans
that J.
Edgar Hoover drew up to
suspend habeas corpus and arrest and detain 12,000 people who he
considered "disloyal" just weeks after the
start of the Korean War.
It's eerily similar to the way that, just weeks after 9/11, the
president issued an order
that allowed the government to detain people indefinitely without
charges and without access to lawyers; Congress eventually followed
suit by legalizing the denial of habeas corpus to those considered
"enemy
combatants."

As the Times
reports on a historical plan to suspend civil liberties, the Washington Post
describes the
FBI's current efforts to build an enormous database of individual's
characteristics. If all goes as planned, biometric data - a scan of a
pupil, a scrap of
DNA, or an image of a face - can be matched like fingerprints,
with
data shared across agencies or with corporations
doing background checks. The public imagination has grown
attached to technological wizardry that seems to give us such
scientific certainty. Unfortunately, the only
large-scale study
of such
biometric tracking systems suggests they lead to a large number of
false positives. It's not hard to imagine being erroneously
caught up in a nightmare scenario as J. Edgar's handpicked list expands
into the millions and becomes automated and ubiquitous.

It is in those strangely parallel universes, that of the Nixon era and
post 9/11 America, where I set In
the Wind. I got the first teasing itch of a
storyline several years ago when a Minnesota woman who lived a quiet
middle-class life
was arrested by the FBI. They claimed she had been a member of the Symbionese
Liberation Army, one of the stranger radical groups that
arose out of the conflict of the sixties. I wondered what it was like
for someone to
live
underground for so many years, and how it affected her family and
friends to learn she had an alternate identity and a radical political
past.

Even earlier, I felt an urge to write about the reality of mental
illness. Crime fiction quite often exploits
false stereotypes about mental illness to provide its
monsters. It's easier to be entertained by evil that is safely
distanced from us. We can explore the dark side without risking being
implicated in evil committed by people who are fundamentally different
than us. Yet in fact, people with a mental illness are more
likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators - and they
are not different. The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill estimates
that one in 17 Americans suffers from a major mental illness; twenty
percent of families in the US are affected. Yet, because of social
stigma, we don't generally
talk about it, so the mentally ill remain fair game for
demonization. For me, the issue is personal. My
brother Paul, my best friend in childhood, was misdiagnosed as
schizophrenic while in college; in fact, he had a form of
bipolar disorder that included powerful delusions during manic
phases. He struggled with the illness until his death,
and so did we, because so often in a crisis there was absolutely
nothing anyone could do
to help. One in five families goes through the same thing.

So in this book, I tried to braid together a family's all-too-common
personal crisis
as they deal with a child with bipolar disorder, with national
events, then and now. In the story, a Native American activist
wanted for the murder of an FBI agent in 1972 is hunted in the present
time, using methods reminiscent of the counterintelligence activities
that were exposed as unconstitutional after Watergate. Past collides
with present, and the political becomes personal.

Part of me hoped this
strange resonance between then and now
would be passé before In
the Wind was published. Unfortunately, that isn't the
case. Earlier this month, a senator from
Connecticut said
these words on the floor of the US Congress:

Americans
have rightfully been concerned since before World War
II about the dangers of hostile foreign agents likely to commit acts of
espionage. Similarly, the violent acts of political terrorists can
seriously endanger the rights of Americans. Carefully focused
intelligence investigations can help prevent such acts.

But too often intelligence has lost this focus and
domestic
intelligence activities have invaded individual privacy and violated
the rights of lawful assembly and political expression. . . .
intelligence activity in the past decades has, all too
often, exceeded the restraints on the exercise of governmental power
which are imposed by our country's Constitution, laws, and traditions.

We have seen segments of our Government, in their
attitudes and
action, adopt tactics unworthy of a democracy, and occasionally
reminiscent of the tactics of totalitarian regimes. We have seen a
consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such
as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were
expanded to what witnesses characterized as "vacuum cleaners,''
sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens.

That these abuses have adversely affected the
constitutional
rights of particular Americans is beyond question. But we believe the
harm extends far beyond the citizens directly affected.

Personal privacy is protected because it is
essential to
liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our Constitution checks the power
of Government for the purpose of protecting the rights of individuals,
in order that all our citizens may live in a free and decent society.
Unlike totalitarian states, we do not believe that any government has a
monopoly on truth.

When Government infringes those rights instead of
nurturing
and protecting them, the injury spreads far beyond the particular
citizens targeted to untold number of other Americans who may be
intimidated. . . . Secrecy should no longer
be allowed to shield the existence of constitutional, legal and moral
problems from the scrutiny of all three branches of government or from
the American people themselves.